June 23 – June 27, 2021
2021년 6월 23일 – 6월 27일
Czong Ho Kyim Gallery, CICA Museum
Featured in the exhibition Fragmented Landscape at CICA Museum, Hyemi Kim’s City Collage is a short video series juxtaposing various city scenes to compose fantastic, utopic urban landscapes. The looped digital vistas are a peek into a uniquely imagined time and space, an otherworldly environment cobbled together from fragments of the world’s modern metropolises. City Collage flows infinitely, connecting past and present. In perpetual motion, the series makes viewers wonder whether this impossible city propels them forward or traps them in its thrall.
The majority of the video was sourced by the artist herself, a firsthand witness of those places. While she cut and reassembled the videos, her memories of the places they were recorded were likewise remixed and newly fused—City Collage is also the landscape of the unconscious, beyond physical rules and reality. A complex and animate urban landscape materializes—levitating structures, exaggerated form, and inexplicable composition reveal the digital artifice of this surreal landscape. By dissolving and deconstructing the symbols of the built environment, the originality of places is disappeared and what is left behind are these mysterious landscapes.
The artist, who moved to New York from Seoul, South Korea, attempts to reveal her alienated identity through this exhibition. By combining two different cities, she creates utopic landscapes to fill her cultural gap and help unify her identity. Landscapes are quietly repeated and meditative even as twisted and exaggerated city structures, blank dark background, and sudden, mysterious sounds break the utopian feeling. With these elements, the artist expresses the confusion and fear of in-between places, but at the same time, shows the dreamlike feeling of being in an unfamiliar space.
Beyond the artist’s personal experience, the exhibition also highlights that people now can place themselves anywhere around the world using computer graphics—people can attach and detach themselves anytime from their environment. Countless images and video sources in the digital world lead people to lose their strong belonging to their own inhabited spaces—the artist’s act of collaging reflects this strangeness and estrangement of people living in a city while dwelling in virtual space.
Hyemi Kim is a multi-media artist based in New York and Seoul. She received her MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts and got her first MFA and BFA in Painting from Sungshin University in Seoul, South Korea. Her video works were shown at Time Square, from the ZAZ corner and several group shows in NYC. She participated in the 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, and 2016 ASYAF. She does numerous video and photo collages in recent years to create a new digital utopia, representing her scattered memories and experiences in contemporary life.
Hyemi Kim, “City Collage 2” (2020)